I was asked if I would give my testimony, and I do not normally do so. So I trust that it will be worthwhile.
I want to read Psalm 103.
Bless the Lord, O my soul;
And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget not all His benefits:
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction;
Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;
Who satisfieth thy desire with good things,
So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle.
The Lord executeth righteous acts,
And judgments for all that are oppressed.
He made known His ways unto Moses,
His doings unto the children of Israel.
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness.
He will not always chide;
Neither will He keep His anger forever.
He hath not dealt with us after our sins,
Nor rewarded us after our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
So great is His lovingkindness toward them that fear Him.
As far as the east is from the west,
So far hath He removed our transgressions from us.
Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.
For He knoweth our frame;
He remembereth that we are dust.
As for man, his days are as grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more.
But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him,
And His righteousness unto children’s children;
To such as keep His covenant,
And to those that remember His precepts to do them.
The Lord hath established His throne in the heavens;
And His kingdom ruleth over all.
Bless the Lord, ye His angels,
That are mighty in strength, that fulfil His word,
Hearkening unto the voice of His word.
Bless the Lord, all ye His hosts,
Ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure.
Bless the Lord, all ye His works,
In all places of His dominion:
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Wonderful psalm. You notice in this version, the American Standard Version of 1901, that the word lovingkindness comes again and again. It seems a somewhat old-fashioned word. In some modern translations it is “steadfast love”; in some, “prevailing love.”
It is an extraordinary Hebrew word—hesed. It simply cannot be explained in any language by one word, or even by two words. You need a whole number of words coming together for this word, lovingkindness. “Mercy” is the old King James Version; “lovingkindness” is the Revised Version and the American Standard Version; “steadfast love” is the Revised Standard Version.
It has this idea of loyal, covenant, enduring, overcoming love and mercy that God shows towards those whom He saves. It is a wonderful, wonderful word, and it explains the Bible.
It also explains my salvation, and it explains your salvation. God never saved you because you were good enough, and He never saved you because you were worthwhile. We are dust, but in some extraordinary way, the Lord loves us.
Why He loves us, we will never know—not even, I think, in eternity. Why the Lord should ever love such as you and me, we give Him so much trouble. It is bad enough that we were all born in sin, that we were a fallen people from the beginning; but the extraordinary thing is that once He saves us, we give Him no end of trouble.
We rebel, we murmur, we hang on to our own self-life. It is extraordinary, really, just how much trouble we give to the Lord.
I was born in Britain by, basically, an accident. That accident was the reason for my survival.
My father was the premier count in the House of Savoy. This is the royal house of Italy, of Bulgaria, of Hungary, of Portugal, and originally of Brazil. He was the premier count; he carried the flag before the king on all state occasions.
The old king, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, had Jewish blood and was from the Braganzas, and was for that reason very unsympathetic to Jews. My father was a Jew, as was my mother—she was a Jewess. But I never knew that.
My father had nightmares in the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties of the last century. It was basically over Mussolini, who was the dictator of Italy. My father warned the king that he thought Mussolini would be the downfall of the royal house and the downfall of Italy.
His nightmares grew to such an extent that he told my mother to take me—I was only a year or two old—and take me back to England. I had been born near my grandmother because my mother wanted her firstborn to be in the vicinity of my grandmother, who would help in the very early days.
So that was the accident, seemingly the accident. At that time, Britain was receiving no refugees, not even babies. But my mother had a British passport. She came from the Jewish community in Dublin, Ireland; originally, they were from Lithuania.
For this reason, when Mother came back to Britain, already pregnant with my sister, she was able to enter Britain. She had a British passport, and because I had been born by this seeming accident, I was also allowed to come back into Britain.
My father and mother never really thought it would be more than a couple of years that we would be parted, because Mussolini was introducing some of the laws that were to end in the murder of the Jewish people. But nobody thought about Adolf Hitler.
Now, I do not know how much you know about history or about the Holocaust, but of course they were Latins, Mediterranean people, and Mediterranean people do not normally think about Anglo-Saxons or others very much. So they thought Mussolini was the trouble—Mussolini and Franco of Spain. They did not really think of Hitler.
But just behind Mussolini was a far more serious and terrible demonic being. It was Hitler.
I was born in 1931. In 1933, I was taken as a little boy from Italy to Britain. I do not remember any of the journey, of course. It was exactly at the time that Adolf Hitler took Germany by force.
From that point onwards, it developed into the Second World War, in which fifty-five million people died and in which six to eight million Jews died in the most horrific circumstances. I never saw my father, I never saw my grandmother, and I never saw the fifty-six other members of the family, who all died in Auschwitz.
In actual fact, the old king tried to save my father. He had a very good intelligence network, and he heard that the Nazis were going to take all the Jews in the middle of the night throughout northern Italy. He knew that it meant they would be killed.
So he said to my father, “You have to flee. I will prepare the royal car, we will pull the blinds down, we will put a standard on the car, and we will take you to Turin, and then up into the Piedmont mountains, where a guide will wait for you to take you over into safety in Vichy France, where my grandmother lived. She had a château south of Lyon.”
My father accepted it. He had no trouble; the Nazis were very superstitious when it came to aristocracy or royalty, and they allowed the car to go through without any searching.
But it was a mistake. If my father had only gone into a monastery—or as one of his friends did, been dressed up as a monk and worked as a priest in the Vatican Library—he might have been saved. That friend survived the war. But my father instead went to Vichy France, which was an ally of the Nazis at that time. I hope I am not boring you.
At that point, Klaus Barbie arrived. Called the Butcher of Lyon, he was the Gauleiter, or the man in charge of the Nazi side of things in Vichy France. He hated my family, and my father in particular.
My father met my mother simply because the old king was so worried about his outspoken views that he sent him as the silk attaché to the Italian Embassy in London. There, at a cocktail party, he met my mother. That is how it all happened. They were then married in the Great Synagogue in Rome.
That is a little bit of the background of the family. My father’s family were out of the tribe of Judah. My mother was from the tribe of Benjamin. Both of them knew something of their family background.
My father’s family had been called Judah in every single generation for a thousand years. So my circumcision name was [unclear], Judah, Jair, Lambert Dobsky. Our family name was Dobsky. My father was Count Julian Giulio; Julian and Giulio are both Gentile forms of the name Judah, meaning praise.
The agreement that Father and Mother made was that we would come back to Britain. Mother had deep red hair and green eyes, and my father said, “I do not think anyone will think you are Jewish. You take Lance. Never tell him he is Jewish for these two years, until we see what happens.”
My sister was born in Richmond, Surrey, England, and we grew up not knowing we were Jewish. What was very interesting was that we were excused all the religious instruction at school. We did not have to be part of the prayers said first thing in the morning. I was very happy about that, I have to tell you.
I asked my mother, “Why? Why are we different to all the rest of the children at school?” Mother said, “We are modern. We believe that you should choose your religion when you are of age.”
So I said, “You mean I can choose to be anything?” Mother said, “Oh, yes.” Of course, she did not mean it. “Oh yes,” she said, “you can be anything.” “Can I be a Muslim?” I said. “Oh yes, if you wish,” she said.
We grew up not knowing, and we never went into a synagogue. We never went into a church or chapel. We had no contact with Christian people. I never read the Bible. I understood that the Bible was a whole book of legends, myths, and exaggerations.
I really did not even believe that Jesus had lived. I used to speak to the boys at school who had the Crusader badge—you know, they belonged to a Christian organization for boys—and I used to say to them, “I do not believe Jesus existed.” They said, “Oh, you must be mad.” So I said, “No, I think you are mad. I do not think He ever really existed.”
That is how we went until one day—can you believe this?—Mother came back. It was the Blitz, when many people were dying on every side, and she said, “There is going to be a children’s rally in one of the movie houses. We call it a cinema. I think you children should go.”
To this day, I do not know what entered her head. But off we went to this movie house, which was packed with children. I went with my sister and our two closest friends, who lived in the same avenue.
We could not understand it. I had never seen anything like it. They sang hymns—I had never heard them—and it seemed so odd to me, everyone standing up and singing. Then a man acted something out on the platform of the movie house. I could not understand what he was doing. It seemed very stupid to me. He was a famous missionary from South America.
Then they all went out to “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” each Sunday school marching out. That left the four of us in the centre of this movie house on our own. A lady sped across and said, “Don’t you children belong to a Sunday school?” “No,” we said. “Would you like to?” I said, “No,” and my sister said, “Yes.”
She said, “I will get someone to come to you every Sunday and bring you to Sunday school.” That is how I came into the Sunday school of a famous evangelical Baptist church in Richmond, Surrey.
It was very interesting, basically, because I endured it. I could not understand them. Everything the Sunday school teacher said went in one ear and out the other. I could not even say the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the two years we were there.
But at the end of those two years, this old Sunday school teacher, who was one of the deacons of the Baptist church, went to an old bag, took out books, and gave every one of the boys a book. But he did not give me one.
So I sat through the whole lesson thinking, “Why did he not give me a book?” These boys were terrible. They let off stink bombs. They took mice and let them go into the Sunday school to cause a great fuss. I remember the leader of the Sunday school standing up on a chair because she was so afraid of a white mouse running around.
I went up to him afterwards and said, “Why did you not give me a book?” He looked at me and said, “Didn’t I give you a book?” “No,” I said, “you did not.” So he put his hand in his bag—I believe he deliberately did not give it to me; he was so afraid of my mother—and took the book out. “Here,” he said, “here is a book. This is your book.”
I took it, and I saw on the cover, C. T. Studd: Missionary, Statesman, Cricketer, and Pioneer. I thought to myself, “This is weird.”
I understood that all Christians were weird. They were eccentric and unhygienic. My idea of Christians was either very, very ancient people with white hair, like mine, bent over, and so old that they could hardly talk or breathe. Anyone young, I thought, could never be a Christian.
So I was intrigued. How could a man be a famous cricketer and a Christian?
Well, this was the first Christian book I ever read. I would never have read it if he had given it to me at the beginning. The only reason I got the desire to read it was that he did not give it to me, and I had to ask for it.
When I got it, I began to think, “How can this man be a Christian?” Then I read that book in one week—six days—and I finished it on a Saturday, a Shabbat. I was so moved by what I read.
Three things captured me. The first was that this man gave away a fortune. In today’s measurement, it would have been some thirty million pounds, and he gave it away in one week.
I thought to myself, “This man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than money.” You have to understand how I felt, because we were always getting little things through the letterbox asking us to help local churches with their organ, their bell tower, or something else that was perishing in the church or chapel.
I used to hear my mother say, “Oh, disgraceful—sending things to us. We do not believe in God, and they ask us to help their God.” I remember being in my pram as a little boy when we went past the local parish church. It had a great notice outside asking everyone to help with the bell tower.
There was a thermometer on one side, with a tiny little bit of red at the bottom, and right up to the top was the money required. My mother said to me, “Lance, do you understand what this is?” Of course, I could not understand any of it. So she said, “This belongs to people who believe in God, and when they are in need of money, they ask us, who do not believe in their God, to help Him.”
I never forgot it. So I thought, “This man has found something worth more than money and was able to give away a whole fortune in one week.”
Then he went out as a missionary. When he went for his medical, the doctor said, “You cannot be a missionary.” “Oh,” said C. T. Studd, “God has told me and called me, so I shall be one.” “No,” said the doctor, “you are a museum of diseases.”
But he went out to China with the Cambridge Seven, then to India, and finally to the Congo, and he never went back to England. He was a famous cricketer, and he sacrificed his fame and popularity. Then I thought to myself, “This man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than fame and popularity.”
Then the third thing that I read in the book gripped me. He and his wife were very much in love. She came from a very aristocratic family, as did C. T. Studd, and they decided they would part. She would remain in England, where there were not planes in those days, and look after the home end for prayer and finances. He would remain in the foreign field.
I thought to myself, “This man is crazy, or he has found something worth more than human companionship.”
There was one other thing that gripped me: his humour. I had been born with humour, and I always thought that God had absolutely no humour. Then I found this man, C. T. Studd, who could laugh with God.
Later in my life, I began to understand why Abraham called Isaac “laughter.” That is what Yitzhak means in Hebrew: laughter. I began to understand, from my own experience, the humour that God has with those who become His friends.
I always remember one thing in particular: in a prayer meeting with the other missionaries, C. T. Studd saying, “Your Word, Lord, says that You will give us everything that the soles of our feet tread upon. I take size fourteen. We are putting them down on this particular ground in Congo, which the Lord gave.”
At the end of reading that book, I did not know what to do. So I stood, because I thought that was the way you prayed. Then I thought, no, I think they kneel. So I knelt. Then I felt uncomfortable kneeling, and thought, no, I think they stand. So I stood up.
Then I prayed a very unscriptural prayer, for the Bible says that those who come to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. But I said, “O God, if there is a God, would You please do in me what You did in C. T. Studd? Would You please make me what You made him?”
That was my prayer. I did not feel anything. But the most extraordinary thing had happened. I went off that afternoon to watch Charlie Chaplin. You would have said, “Well, nothing has happened to him. He is watching Charlie Chaplin.”
But that evening, when I came back, I said to my sister, “I would like to go to church.” She looked at me as if I were a ghost. “You want to go to church?” “Yes,” I said. “I will come with you,” she said.
So the two of us, for the first time ever, found ourselves in the presence of Christians in a church service on a Sunday morning. We found it very odd: they stood up and sang, then sat down; a plate went by, and people put something in it. We had never seen anything like it. We found it all very strange.
Then they read the Bible, then we stood up and sang, then they had announcements, then they all sat down again. Then they stood up and sang, and finally we had a kind of sermon.
In the announcements they said, “This evening, eight people are being baptized on confession of their faith in the Lord Jesus.” We thought, “What in the world is baptism? What are these strange people going to do?”
We went up to our old Sunday school teacher and said, “Excuse me, what is baptism?” He said, “When people have believed in the Lord Jesus and received Him, they are baptized in water by immersion.” Well, that did not mean anything to us.
My sister said, “What do you mean? Do you put them under?” “Yes,” he said, “we put them absolutely under and then up.” Then my sister said, “Do they wear robes? Do they have crowns on their heads?” It sounds ridiculous, but we were children. I was twelve and a half, and my sister was ten.
The old Sunday school teacher said, “Why do you not come and see for yourselves? I will keep you a seat, because it is packed.” So my sister and I came and sat on the front row overlooking the baptistery, so that we could get a full view of this strange rite that was going to take place.
I spent the whole time watching the bubbles come up from the water while the poor man preached his heart out. It was Alan Redpath, a famous evangelist and teacher.
The eight people who were baptized were absolutely ordinary people—bank clerks, secretaries, and one girl who, if I may put it kindly, was simple. I think she was a little autistic. They all confessed how they had come to the Lord.
The pastor said, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God?” Then they told their testimonies. I was so shocked, because I discovered that every one of these very ordinary eight people had the same experience as C. T. Studd.
I thought he was unique. I thought, “He is the only Christian in the world, in history.” Now I suddenly saw eight very ordinary people who had the same experience. They all went down into the water, were baptized, and came out.
Then Alan Redpath said at the end, “If you have been challenged by what you have seen and what you have heard, will you give your life to the Lord Jesus? And if so, will you stand up?”
I felt an extraordinary kind of power that hit me. I was in a quandary. What should I do? Should I stand or should I sit? Then I whispered to my sister, “Shall I stand?” She said, “No.” But I stood.
Then, terrible—a terrible sense of sin came over me. I was only twelve and a half, and I wept and wept and wept.
The old Sunday school teacher put his arm around me and tried to comfort me. Then two old people came out—so old, they were exactly what I had always thought Christians were. He was white-haired, she was white-haired and bent over.
This dear Sunday school teacher said, “Pastor Rose and Mrs. Rose, do you need something?” They said, “No. When he stood up”—I was in a black-red jacket—“the Lord said to me, ‘Pray for him. He will go to the ends of the earth and speak for Me, because he is a chosen vessel.’”
Then he turned to me. I had never had anything to do with Christians, and he said, “Young man, my wife and I are going to pray for you every day, because God will be with you.”
I did not know I was Jewish. I had no idea of our background. It was all kept from us.
The next day at tea time—because we always have tea—my sister said, “Mama, Lance stood up in church yesterday.” My mother wheeled round and said, “What?” My sister said, “He became a Christian.”
My mother looked at me and said, “You silly boy, you have become a Christian. If you are going to become a Christian, at least become a Catholic or an Anglican. They are respectable. But a Baptist—barnstorming people!”
She said, “I will sue the minister for wrongful influence of a minor.” I said to Mother, “But you said I could choose when I was thirteen.” Thirteen is an interesting figure, because, as I now know, it is bar mitzvah. I did not know it then.
“Yes,” my mother said, “but not what you have chosen.” But she never explained.
Mr. Redpath came round to see Mother. My mother was a very fashionable lady, a very normal kind of person. She expected to see some weak old gentleman come up the drive and ring at the door.
Instead, there came this huge fellow, a bit like Malcolm—this size, blonde like him—an international rugby player, thirty-one years of age at the time. Mother positively could not believe it.
She said, “What right have you got to influence a child who is not even of age?” He said, “I did not influence him. God influenced him.” Mother did not know anything about that book or my prayer the day before. So Mother collapsed. She said, “All right, let us see if they are happy.”
Mother never told us anything about our background because she had an idea that, if the church knew we were Jewish, they would discriminate against us. So we never knew it.
The one thing about C. T. Studd that gripped me then as a youngster, and has gripped me all the way through my life, was his words: “All or nothing.”
“If Jesus died for me,” he said, “and gave Himself for me, there is nothing that I can withhold from Him.”
I said to the Lord that night at that baptismal service, “I, by Your grace, will be all.”
I settled an issue at the very beginning of my Christian life. I surrendered. I did not have any arguments with the Lord. I surrendered.
Two or three days after that, in a kind of—I cannot quite explain it—but it was like a dream vision, the Lord appeared to me. I remember it very well. He was clothed in white down to the bottom, and something obscured His face. In His hand was a vivid, huge light.
He just said to me, “You shall serve Me.” And I said, “I will.”
I thought He was going to send me to Mongolia.
A few months later, I said to the Lord, “Lord, if I had ten lives, I would give every one of them to You: one for China, one for Mongolia, one for Tibet, one for Korea.” I went through a whole lot of nations.
I think the Lord had other ideas. But from that point, with all my weaknesses and failings and sins—the besetting sins—I determined that I would be all for the Lord, or nothing.
Years later, my mother came to the Lord. Donald and Jerry Adcox—some of you will know them—came across to England to stay for a week or two with Robert and Miriam Vickery, the man who built Disney World in Orlando.
My mother had never met Christians like these. They were normal in every way. They invited Mother to go to the States, and she went for, I think, four weeks. We noticed a very great change when she came back.
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, it was clear that Mother had had dealings with the Lord.
One day, when I came back from Halford House, Mother said, “Take your coat off and sit down. I want to talk with you seriously.” I thought she was going to say what she had often said: “You have had all those studies at university on classical Chinese, Oriental philosophy, Chinese history, and I do not know what else, and you do nothing with it. You should be a journalist or something like that.”
But instead, she said, “I have had a voice in my ear for the last whole year telling me to tell you the whole truth.” Then she told the story I began with: who our father was, how he had died in Auschwitz with fifty-seven other members of the family, and how the cable had come from the International Red Cross shortly after we were saved.
It said that a Count Dobsky had been shot in the house, and the rest had been gassed. She never told us because she was so afraid that we would say something in church. She said, “The two of them are so happy.”
My mother used to tell all her friends, “I have a monk and a nun for a son and a daughter. They live in the Bible.”
When Mother told us the whole story, she said to me at the end, “Are you shocked?” “No,” I said, “it explains everything.” It explained why the whole Jewish community in Richmond had always tried to look after us, and why the old rabbi himself had often said, “If I could only help you, if you would only let me help you.” But Mother always said, “We are not Jewish.”
The whole story of Halford House is another story. It would take far too long, and you would be bored stiff, I think. But I could tell you story after story of miracle after miracle: on the physical side, people falling off roofs and not even being bruised, without a bone broken; and how God supplied money.
I never forgot when we needed money and the builder came to me and said, “I need so-and-so.” “When do you need it by?” I said. He said, “By two o’clock this afternoon, to get it into the bank by three o’clock.” Then I heard myself saying, “You shall have it.”
When we first had this builder, I had said to him, “We are believers, Christian believers. We believe in God; we believe in the Lord Jesus. We are young people, and we have no money. Are you prepared to work for us? We shall pay, and God will provide the money.”
He was a Cockney weightlifter, and years later he told me, “I thought to myself, ‘They have all got money. Of course they have got money. It is just their way of saying, “You take it out of the bank. God has provided it.”’”
But I never forgot that day. I waited for the second post, and nothing came. Then I said to Margaret, who was looking after the house, “Margaret, we must call everybody together, have a quick lunch, and after lunch go into the library upstairs. We will get on our knees and ask God to meet us by two o’clock.”
All thirteen of us went up into the library, and we knelt in a circle. Bill, the builder, came in the back door looking for us. He looked in the kitchen, then the main room, then my study. Nobody was there. Then he thought, “I know, they are upstairs,” and he came up the stairs.
While an old Cockney man, who had been a seaman all his life, was praying, he said, “Lord, we have not got this money. We have to have it right now, Lord—two o’clock, just ten minutes away.” Bill opened the door to hear him praying.
I saw the door shut, and I heard a terrible groan. Bill went down the stairs, groaning like an elephant giving birth. Then he stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He found exactly the money, in a great pile, on the doormat.
This unsaved man scooped it all up in his arms, came rushing up the stairs, threw open the door, and said, “You can all stop praying. It has come.”
But how did it come? He had only come past that doormat a few minutes before. Do you mean to tell me that someone stood outside the front door with a great pile of notes, flicking them through that tiny little letterbox? They had as much faith to give us the money as we had to receive it. But what about the unsaved workmen? They could have stolen it. Where did it come from?
I could tell so many stories. But there came a time when, one evening as I was going to bed, I heard a voice behind me. I cannot explain it—human and not human. The voice said, “Lance, go back to your people.”
I never turned. I thought to myself, “Who are my people? Are they Polish, Irish, Italian? Who are my people?” I never said Jews, because I knew deep in my heart. Then I got into bed and fell asleep.
Three months later, I was going to bed and exactly the same thing happened again. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. This is my mind playing tricks.” I got into bed and fell asleep. In those days, I slept very easily. Now I am old, I sleep fitfully.
Three months after that, as I was getting into bed, this voice said, “Return to your people.” This time I knew, as I had the previous two times, that it was the Lord.
I said, “Lord, You have to understand. I have seen this work here grow from the beginning. I cannot—how am I to come out of it? How am I to, in some way, get free, as it were? It is no possibility. Nobody will understand it.”
So I said, “Now, Lord, do not be angry with me. I have grown beyond having to ask for fleeces. Do you understand what a Gideon’s fleece is? Confirmation. I had not asked You for years to confirm something. I know that I have to discern what is Your will, but this is too big a matter. Will You confirm it?”
“And will You confirm it by giving me a home in Jerusalem that I would find suitable?”
Within two months, God gave me the home. It was miraculous in every detail: the way the money came, because I never asked for money or made anyone know what the need was. It came in its entirety—extraordinarily.
Then I knew that I had to be in Israel, and I had to be part of my own people. So that is the story. I hope it has not bored you.
Let me say something. It is not good enough to be a Christian. If you are going to be a child of God, you need to be one hundred percent for the Lord.
If you are one hundred percent for the Lord, the Lord will be one hundred percent for you in all your provision and all your need. It is very simple.
Frances Ridley Havergal, the great hymn writer—we sang one of her hymns earlier—said:
They that trust You wholly
Find You wholly true.
That is one of the first lessons I would underline. Here is the second: it is not good enough just to be a Christian. There has to be fire in you.
The thing that caught me, like Moses when he was caught by the thorn bush that burned with fire and was not consumed, was that old missionary, C. T. Studd. A very difficult man—but there was a fire in him.
It was a fire that God Himself had placed there. And I, with all my unbelief, was arrested by it. I do not think anything else would ever have arrested me but something as remarkable as that.
I am old now. I have seen a number of servants of the Lord who had that kind of fire. It puts that service, that ministry, into another dimension.
Well, I must finish. I think we are in for a time of enormous turmoil—not just in the world, but in the United States: economic, political, religious, social, on every level.
I have no doubt in my heart at all—myself, I am not asking you to believe what I believe—but I have no doubt in my heart that we are at the very threshold of the appearing of the Antichrist.
I am not suggesting that any of your presidential candidates could be the Antichrist. That is not what I am trying to say. But what I am saying is this: in times of enormous turmoil, these monsters arise.
Hitler came out of turmoil in Germany that wrecked the whole economy and the whole nation. Out of that, Hitler came. Mussolini came in Italy out of a time of enormous turmoil. Franco came in Spain out of a time of enormous turmoil. Mao Tse-tung came out of a time of such turmoil.
These are, if I may say, small fry compared with the one coming. Daniel 7 speaks of the four winds beating the sea—a typhoon-driven sea—and out of it came four beasts.
Revelation 13 says exactly the same thing. John said, “I stood on the seashore, and I saw coming up out of the sea a beast.”
That means you cannot depend upon your parents’ salvation. You have to have your own experience of the Lord if you are going to stand in the days that lie ahead.
When everything that can be shaken will be shaken, you have to have your own original dealings with the Lord: a relationship with the Lord that comes from spiritual birth. Make your calling and election sure.
Do not just trust the kind of assembly here, or the other assembly on the east side. Do not put your trust in the fact that you have friends who are believers. Do not put your trust in the fact that you have Christian parents, you younger ones.
You have to have your own genuine, real experience of the Lord. Nothing else will carry us through in the days ahead. Do not be afraid.
I have a suspicion that God is going to do something in Israel and in the Jewish people. I am pretty sure it is in the Word—that is, salvation. I also have the strongest suspicion that God is doing a work in China such as He has never done in its long, long history.
You have a responsibility, as I have a responsibility. You may be American citizens born in America—many of you; some of you are more American than Americans—but you have a responsibility for the country and people from whom you originally came.
As I have a responsibility for the people and country from which I originally came, may the Lord take this poor testimony of mine—which is, I hope, more to do with the lovingkindness and mercy, the steadfast love of the Lord, than of Lance Lambert—and make it real to you.
May He make it real in such a way that you will not be able to be the same again, but God will take hold of you as He took hold of me and make you His own vessel for service.
Shall we pray?
Beloved Lord, we pray together that You will take these poor words of mine and somehow make those words real to every one of us.
We are living in days of change, of enormous change, of turmoil, of confusion. Lord, we need You.
You are the one unshakable Rock in the midst of all this. We pray that every one of us here may dig deep and lay the foundation upon the Rock—not upon parents, not upon friends, not upon second-hand experience, but upon the Lord Jesus Himself.
Hear our prayer, Lord. We commit this to You in the name of Jesus. Amen.